Tony Robert Judt

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Tony Robert Judt , British historian and critic (born Jan. 2, 1948, London, Eng.—died Aug. 6, 2010, New York, N.Y.), wrote polemic criticism on such issues as the European Union, Israel, and the international role of the U.S. Judt embraced Marxist and Zionist ideology as a young man working on a kibbutz in Israel and as national secretary (1965–67) for the Zionist group Dror. His experiences as a volunteer translator in the Six-Day War changed his beliefs and ultimately led to his highly contentious criticism of Israel laid out in a 2003 article in The New York Review of Books, in which he called for a single secular binational state. Judt studied history (B.A., 1969; Ph.D., 1972) at King’s College, Cambridge, initially focusing on French 19th-century intellectual history. After teaching at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and California, Berkeley, he moved (1987) to New York University, where he was founder (1995) and director of the Remarque Institute. His later work was distinguished by its attention to the former Soviet bloc, his application of history to contemporary issues, and his interdisciplinary analysis as demonstrated in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 2008, but he continued to work, criticizing consumer culture and the lack of belief in social democracy in Ill Fares the Land (2010). Judt in 2009 was awarded a George Orwell Special Prize for his lifelong contribution to British political writing.